


the prison and the open hand

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Series: punchworld [3]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), The Punchlines
Genre: D&D Backstory, F/F, F/M, Unhealthy Relationships, fixit fic, kind of., kind of?, not even slightly wholesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 15:26:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15688209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: "Oh Casimir," she said, "have a little faith."





	the prison and the open hand

**Author's Note:**

> not the first time and not the LAST TIME I'll write weird backstory/speculative fic/fixit fic for my dnd campaign, i'm sure. 
> 
> ACTUAL PUNCHLINES: THIS IS NOT FOR U.
> 
> Things to know: 
> 
> Lucrezia Valentín is like, Viola Davis in How to Get Away With Murder, if Viola Davis were also playing Jude Law's Young Pope.  
> Casimir is like young Tim Curry, if young Tim Curry were a malnourished half-Tiefling.  
> Elís is Jesus if Jesus were played by Sonequa Martin-Green, and Sonequa Martin-Green were also a Half-Elf. 
> 
> It's only kind of Catholicism. 
> 
> Oh, also the title comes from Vienna Teng's "Augustine", which is, as is everything Vienna Teng, incredible.

Lucrezia Valentín was baptized three days after her birth, and consecrated at once to Elís Christ the Savior of All Mankind, Who Takes Away The Sins of the World, Our Lady of the Universal Faith. She didn’t wail when the holy water was poured over her head, but gave a surprised hiccup. 

  
Elís, attending to business of her own, paid this no attention.  
  
*  
  
Casimir di Sabbia was baptized three months after his birth, an act which could be considered mercy or cruelty, depending on your point of view.  
  
At the time his name was Belial, and he was very small and crimson as a rose, with a thin baby’s tail curled up around his leg. A demon’s get, who lived to see the church only because the hunter who killed the bitch noticed the whites of his eyes, and correctly deduced it was half-human.  
  
The monastery he brought Belial to was at first inclined to hit him with a shovel and toss the body behind the woodshed, but the eyes were pointed out again, and then argued over, and finally it was decided that they should baptize the thing first, just in case it had a soul.  
  
This, Elís did take note of. It was the first time anyone had tried to consecrate a Tiefling to Her church. Tieflings were repulsed by Her symbols, and burned at the touch of Her holy water. Elís watched with great interest as they put the baby in a sacred font.  
  
The whole thing went up in smoke, as the half-human baby burned inside and out.  
  
When they tugged him out, they found to their shock that the crimson of his skin had been burned clean off, revealing a baby nearly ordinary in his pink nakedness, except for the tail.  
  
It was quickly deemed a miracle of St. Jude, who famously favored lost causes, and the monastery decided to raise the poor mutilated thing as a novitiate, an offering to the light of Elís.  
  
They docked the tail.  
  
*  
  
When Lucrezia was thirteen years old, her sister Isabella ate a poisoned communion wafer, turned purple, and died on the floor of St. Petra’s Basilica.  
  
Lucrezia was sorry, but not particularly for Isabella. Isabella was fifteen years older than her--the daughter of her father’s first wife who had died--and lived in the capitol, where Lucrezia rarely saw her.  
  
No, Lucrezia was sorry because Isabella had been the child the family had consigned to the church, and excepting the bastard half-brother she wasn’t supposed to know about, she had no other siblings.  
  
Valentín was a new house in Rema. Her family had been merchants in Spanalfarheim only a generation ago, and moderate wealth and sheer stubbornness had purchased their current tenuous hold on the Remagna; they needed a daughter in the church to gain them those two most essential currencies: power and favor.

With Isabella dead, that fell, unfortunately, to Lucrezia.   
  
The Church, unfortunately, was not to Lucrezia’s taste.  
  
She’d grown up dreaming of a distinguished career in the Holy Army. Her mother had enthusiastically encouraged this desire, since plenty of bloodthirsty young men and women had won themselves honor, glory, and significant marriages on the plains of Velgare or Isntium. She had been trained in tactics with a retired Elísian paladin since she was six, and drilled with a short sword and battle cantrips every morning for the last three years. Lucrezia would have been an excellent warrior.  
  
But the Church required a daughter, or the Valentín family might as well skulk back to Spanalfarheim and curry favor with the dwarves.  
  
So Isabella died, and Lucrezia was rushed from the training field to the seminary, where she was laughably old compared to the other novitiates, and struggled terribly with the simplest cleric spells. It took her a full three months to master _Light_.  
  
By the time her parents had bribed the monastery to let her graduate in one year instead of three, so she could take the Valentín bishopric away from her incompetent cousin, it was already widely known that Lucrezia Valentín was only barely educated, shockingly magically inept, and entirely innocent of the dangerous nuances of Church political life.  
  
But Lucrezia had not been training to be a soldier all her life, or even an especially brave lieutenant.  
  
From the first, Lucrezia had been preparing herself to be a general. If cleric magic was harder for her to master at first than battle magic had been, it was no matter--she _would_ master it. She was stubborn, and she was smart, but more than either of those things, she was cunning. She knew what she _had_ to do, so she did it.  
  
Mastering her fellow priests and bishops was an altogether simpler matter.  
  
A weapon remains a weapon, no matter how fine the sheath. Lucrezia learned to wield herself well.

*

When Casimir was thirteen, and two years late entering the priesthood because the cardinalate had yet to determine if he had a soul, Bishop Bianchi made him drink a goblet of pure holy water.  
  
Bianchi was twenty, a scion of one of the wealthiest houses in Rema, and a full three inches shorter than Casimir. He kept his tone pleasant and his demeanor kind when he informed Casimir his life was worth less than the dirt under their feet, just as if the other novitiates weren’t gathered at his shoulders, openly laughing at Casimir’s face.  
  
“I think this will resolve the matter quickly, my child,” Bianchi told Casimir pleasantly, offering the goblet of holy water the way a priest offered the sacred cup during mass. “Either Elís’s light will burn the demon out of you, or it will burn up the thing you believe is a soul.”  
  
Casimir’s hands were red and chapped simply from blessing himself at the chapel doors--the tip of the index finger on his right hand was permanently scabbed over. If he had a bad week, the scab opened up in the water, leaving a crimson trail in the clear silver bowl, and the altar girls would have to pour out the entire basin, so no one else would sully themselves with the tainted water. The cross Casimir painted on his brow and breast and collar bones would be an ugly red smear, a parody of a true blessing.  
  
It had been a bad week, and the cross was still visible on Casimir’s skin, a gory badge. His hand was bandaged, to keep from marking everything he touched in a similar manner, and he had taken it upon himself to pack salt into the cut, to help it scar over.  
  
Nothing about Casimir’s life, in short, had prepared him to do anything other than take the goblet from Bianchi and drain it as fast as he could.  
  
He couldn’t manage it in one gulp. It took three. By the end he could no longer hear anything, the pain was so bad.  
  
It hurt more than anything else had before, and then abruptly it didn’t.  
  
Casimir came back to himself on the refectory floor, and someone was touching his throat and chest with cool, small hands. Healing spread out from her palms, and he gasped and gasped, breath forcing its way into his abused airway, still knitting itself back together, and it hurt, and he was coming alive again. In that first moment where agony met relief, he really believed it was Elís herself who had taken mercy on him.  
  
Then he opened his eyes, and it was Cardinal Valentín sitting beside him on the floor, her scarlet robes crumpled, the ruby cardinal’s ring glowing with magic over his chest, a deep scowl on her face.  
  
“Eminence,” he rasped, and she hushed him.  
  
“Don’t speak, child,” she said. “Your little friends almost killed you.”  
  
Casimir shook his head, hardly knowing what he objected to. They weren’t his friends, and it never helped to blame his tormentors. Besides--he had wondered, stupidly, if it would work.  
  
He flexed his right hand, just to be sure, and the cut pulsed stubbornly at him. So he was still a demon spawn. “It doesn’t matter,” he told Valentín. “I’m still alive.”  
  
Cardinal Valentín frowned at him.    
  
“I--am sorry for the inconvenience, Eminence,” he said uneasily.  
  
“Listen to me,” she said, and something about her voice had changed, as though she meant what she said now, and hadn’t before. “The world will kill you, if you let it. You’re an accident, and nature hates accidents. You weren’t meant to exist.” Casimir flinched at the baldness of it, although it was no more than Bianchi had been telling him for weeks, and then flinched again when Valentín touched him. She caught his chin between her forefinger and thumb, forcing his gaze up to hers. Her eyes were hard. “This life wasn’t meant for you,” she repeated, “ _But that does not mean you cannot serve the Goddess._ Her works are mysterious, and Her ways not ours to know. If you are an abomination, then be one in her service.”  
  
Casimir stared at her, utterly shocked. No one had ever said anything like this to him before. He had never imagined this was possible. “How can I serve Elís, Eminence,” he rasped, the ache in his throat nothing to do with the holy water, “if I have no soul?”  
  
Cardinal Valentín smiled, and he remembered suddenly that the duke of Milan, who was part-Elvish and would know, had called her the most beautiful woman in a hundred years. The Abbot had once called her a cheap, razor-tongued whore. She was still touching his jaw. “You do have a soul,” she told him, with such utter certainty that he almost believed her. “And you will enter the priesthood. I’ll see to that.”  
  
He swallowed hard. “But--I cannot even touch a cross, Eminence. I cannot accept a blessing. I am unworthy.”

She traced the sign of the cross onto his forehead with her thumb. His skin stung slightly, but did not burn. “Casimir,” she said. “Do you _want_ to serve Elís?”  
  
“More than anything,” he swore.  
  
“Would you serve me?” she asked. “When you are older, and you have left this place?”  
  
His heart beat so fast he worried it might break. “Eminence,” he said, his voice cracking, meaning it more than he’d ever meant anything in his life, “I would do anything for you.”  
  
*

Lucrezia ascended to the cardinalate in less than ten years--a meteoric rise, even within the corrupt world of Reman politics. Pope Alexandra hated her, as did Lea Tertius after her, but neither of them managed to get rid of her, despite their most dedicated efforts.

The cardinalate took note.  
  
The papacy was theoretically chosen by Elís, in practice chosen by the Council of Cardinals, and was determined decades in advance, part of a delicate dance of power and compromise maintained by the ruling houses of the Remagna. The tiny, bourgeois house of Valentín was never under even joking consideration for candidacy.  
  
But Lucrezia was very, very clever.  
  
She ascended to the highest throne two weeks before her forty-fifth birthday, and named herself Dominica Sextus. _Finally,_ she thought, real joy burning in her chest like a continual flame, _finally I can serve the Goddess as I was always meant to._

Alone in the papal chambers for the first time, she removed her holy raiment: the fisherman’s ring with her new name inscribed on it, the white cope, the golden pallium, the red slippers, the diamond net she wore in her hair. She let it all slide carelessly to the floor--her attendants would restore it all to its proper place in due time--and approached the dark oak and gold altar, directly opposite the holy bed.  
  
Naked as a child, she knelt before Elís Christ, Holiest and Highest, the woman whose words Dominica Sextus would give voice to. Dominica’s bride, wed just an hour earlier before all of Rema, and every soul in the Faith their children.  
  
The sculpture was carved with magic, because the oak was so warm and lifelike the woman nailed to the golden cross before her might as well have been made of flesh. Painted black hair drifted over Her brown collarbones, so delicate and fine Dominica thought perhaps it would feel soft as hair, were she to reach out and touch it. Dark red drops of blood slid from the sculpture’s hands, from the nails at Her feet, covered in a lacquer that glistened so realistically it was hard to remember it was not wet. Elís’s mouth looked soft and ripe, something to kiss. Her ears tapered to delicate points, a holy secret only Dominica and her attendants knew, and they were mute, forbidden from learning to write, and carried anti-magic amulets, that no one might Send to them.  
  
Only the statue’s eyes reminded Dominica that this was not the Goddess Herself before her. They were cast in pure gold, and bore no pupil and no iris. The statue appeared to be inexorably a living woman and a wrought, crafted thing at the same time.  
  
Dominica knelt very carefully at the statue’s feet.  
  
There was no prayer for direct supplication to the Goddess. There were hundreds of saints who would intercede with the Holy Couple on anyone’s behalf.  
  
But Dominica Sextus was no longer a mere supplicant.  
  
“O Holy One,” she said, keeping her eyes open, fixed on the golden gaze above her, “O Martyr, O Beloved. I am Your Bride, I am Your Voice. Show Yourself to me.”  
  
At first there was nothing, only the rapid beating of Dominica’s heart.  
  
And then the candles at the back of the room went out, in one slow sigh of wind from nowhere. The only light in the room shone down from the ruby glass hanging above the altar. The shadows around the statue thickened, grew rich and plentiful, hid secret things in their pitch depths.  
  
“Most High,” Dominica said, fierce and joyous, “I was born to be Your sword, and now I am reforged for Your hand. What purpose shall You put me to? What infidels shall bleed? What triumph shall next be Yours?”  
  
An unearthly groaning sound came from the statue, although not from its mouth. With agonizing slowness, it wrenched one hand away from the cross, the nail slowly prying away from the wood, leaving a wet streak of blood where it had rested.  
  
The statue clenched its bloody hand into a fist, and then slowly opened it. At first she thought there was nothing in its cupped palm, but when she bent closer, she saw that it had a palmful of its own lacquered blood. It gleamed so brightly in the candlelight that all Dominica could see in it was her own reflection.  
  
In the little pool of blood, she looked younger. Naked, hair tumbling over her shoulders, she might have been Lucrezia Valentín still--if not the girl she was, certainly not the woman she’d painfully and cleverly shaped herself into.  
  
“I don’t understand,” she admitted, her jaw clenching involuntarily.  
  
The statue flexed its hand, and the reflection shuddered and vanished. The blood trickled through the wooden fingers and dripped down to the floor. The golden eyes did not change. It brought its hand back to the cross, and the nail started working horribly back in.  
  
Dominica’s spine straightened. “I have worked very hard to find my way to this spot,” she informed the statue coldly. “I want an answer.”  
  
The nail ground the hand back flush against the wood, and the fingers jerked reflexively.  
  
Dominica stood, so she was at eye-level with the statue. “Tell me,” she demanded. “I am Yours, now tell me how You would use me.”  
  
The statue was breathing. She could feel the little puffs of air stirring against her cheek. It was already blasphemous, what she had done--but she was the Pope, the Voice of the Living Goddess, God’s Vicar on Earth. She could commit no blasphemy. Dominica reached out and fisted her hand in the statue’s hair. It was soft as a cloud. She yanked its head back, so it had no choice but to look directly at her, and then she pressed her hand to the statue’s cheek. That delicate ear tip brushed against her smallest finger.  
  
“You are my wife,” Dominica told the statue. If it was oak, she would be _stone_ . Bedrock; immovable and relentless.  “I am Your voice. Tell me Your will.”  
  
There was a terrible thunder clap, a distant shriek, and the final candle went out. The only light left in the world came from Elís’s golden eyes, only inches from hers. For the first time, it occurred to Dominica to be afraid.  
  
Then, a whisper, soft and terrible, ghosted against the shell of Dominica’s ear: “You are a promising monster.”  
  
“I am the servant of God,” she ground out, with more courage than she thought she’d ever need.  
  
A voiceless laugh. “Aren’t you just.”  
  
The golden eyes blinked, and true darkness descended.  
  
Dominica woke hours later, collapsed on the altar, faint with blood loss, while her guard pounded uselessly at the doors, which would only open from the inside.

The statue was a statue again, obviously false and wooden by the light of day. The eyes were dull and brassy, no more living than a dusty book. Only one of its hands was nailed to the cross. The other pointed gently up to the heavens.  
  
“Very well,” she bit out, and found the blunt wooden nail jammed deep into her belly, and slowly worked it free. She pressed a hand to the wound, stared challengingly up at the statue, and tried to heal herself.  
  
For a breathless second there was nothing, and then the Goddess relented. She felt healing power stream through her hand and into her gut, knitting torn flesh, replenishing the blood and brine of her body.  
  
Her mouth tasted like copper, and she spat blood onto the altar floor. “If my Beloved wants monsters, I’ll find Her some fucking monsters.”  
  
She wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw the statue smile.

*  
  
When he was nineteen, Casimir almost died for Cardinal Valentín. He did die, for an instant--she told him later that his heart had stopped. She saved him, again, by Elís’s grace.  
  
When he was twenty, she became the Pope, and he snapped Cardinal Rosso’s neck in her sitting room.  
  
Her Holiness stared at him, and he stared at the body, the packet of poison Rosso had carried still clutched in his hands. He started to shake. Dying, he reflected, had been easier.  
  
She stroked one hand over his hair when she absolved him, murmuring the prayer over his head: _Deinde, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Matris, et Domina, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen._ Her hand--so small--was heavy on his head. When he didn’t get up off his knees, she plucked a goblet from the table, and asked him to remain a monster, in her service.  
  
He committed many more sins for her in the years after that.  
  
*  
  
When one becomes a priest, one is symbolically joined to God and Elís his wife in marriage.  
  
Joining with any other person would be adultery, and a terrible sin.  
  
Many of the priests, bishops, and cardinals that Casimir knew upheld this doctrine sternly in public, when it was convenient, and interpreted it as liberally as they pleased in the privacy of their bedrooms.  
  
Casimir owed Elís his soul. He took his vows extremely seriously.

He knew she didn’t keep hers. He trusted, completely, in her reasons.  
  
“There are other ways to love,” she told him once, “than self-sacrifice. Or a negation of self.” She looked at him with steady dark eyes, as untouchable in a day dress with the long loop of her braid falling down her back as she would be in full regalia, seated on the ivory throne in the basilica during mass.  
  
“Not for creatures like me, Holiness,” he answered her. He kept his hands loose at his sides. It had not been an invitation, and even if it were, he could not accept it.  
  
“Oh Casimir,” she said, and she sounded almost tender. “Have a little faith.”  
  
*  
  
She tried not to have favorites, especially within the Order of St. Simona, where every zealot was worth his weight in gold--but it was hard not to favor Casimir.

He was talented, ruthless, and loyal to a fault. He was in love with her, but unlike the others who loved her, there was no question of his falling prey to jealousy or idiocy because of it. He loved her without hope or expectation. He was _hers,_ and they both knew it.  
  
The first year she sent him away, he found her a live dragon, bespelled to follow the commands of its master. He’d seen the mechanism of its enslavement; he thought he could bring it to her.  
  
A bespelled red dragon.  
  
A bespelled red dragon, and he thought he could _bring_ _it to her._ Winged victory, a war she could hold in her hands.  
  
_Of course he was her favorite._ _  
_  
*  
  
When he was thirty-three, Casimir died for Dominica Sextus one last time.  
  
_Bring me the dragon,_ she’d ordered him, and Casimir tried his absolute best to bring her a dragon, despite the worried caution of his heart and the avowed goals of the traveling companions he’d come to regard as friends.  
  
His friends killed him for it.  
  
He knew, because before they brought him back, he saw St. Petra frowning down at him. _Casimir,_ she said, audibly disappointed--and then he was back in his body, and Screech was the one saying his name. “ _Casimir_.”  
  
Screech was a mermaid. The Church was extremely clear on the nature of mermaids. They were soulless, unclean things. They may seem beautiful, but they ate the flesh of men in the deeps of the ocean. They had never known the light of Elís. When they died, they turned to foam on the waves.  
  
Screech had always been kind to him, and now she was bent over him, an expression of raw panic on her familiar face. She must not have seen what he did. “Casimir,” she said again, worried. “Are you okay?”  
  
Casimir slowly sat up. The battle was raging around them, and he’d lost his grip on the spell. He’d failed Dominica, and he didn’t have the strength to try again. Zoltán had killed him, and surely Agni and Max would support him for it when they learned the truth. This was catastrophic, and there was nothing he could do about it. He felt oddly and completely at peace. He stared at Screech with something approaching reverence.

“What are you doing?” she said, eyes wide. “We’re--dying in there!”  
  
“What should I do,” he managed, after an unsteady breath.  
  
“Heal yourself, Casimir!” she shouted. “Heal somebody!”  
  
“Yes,” Casimir breathed, and stood up. He had betrayed his companions, and now he would heal them.

When the battle was won, and there was no one left to heal, there was one final task left to him.  
  
_I failed you_ , he sent to Dominica.  
  
There was a very long pause before she answered him, but when she did, it made his knees buckle.  
_  
_ _Wherefore by the judgment of God Almighty, Elís the Queen of Light, the Holy Ghost, and of St. Petra and All The Saints, and by_ _  
_ _  
_ _\--virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in heaven and on earth that which was divinely entrusted to us,_ a different voice continued. It was Cardinal Bianchi’s voice, he recognized distantly.  
  
An instant later Cardinal Guiliana picked up the prayer. _We deprive him with all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lady; we separate_

_\--him from the society of all Christians; we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth; and_

_\--we declare him excommunicated and anathemized, as well as judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobates. So_ _  
_ _  
_ _\--long as he will not burst the fetters of the Devil, amend himself and do penance and make reparation to the Church which he has_

_\--offended, we deliver him to Satan for the perdition of his flesh, so that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment._

Somewhere in Rema, he knew, the woman he loved had gathered twelve cardinals to her side, and they all carried a lit candle in their hands. They had all just put them out.  
  
*  
  
Dominica Sextus denied herself very few things.  
  
She had almost killed herself clawing herself to the position she held now, and she routinely nearly killed her cardinals keeping it. She used the cudgel of her might and the scalpel of her mind to fill Rema’s coffers to bursting, to plan for the future, to spread the glory of the Universal Faith out across the world like a violent, glorious dawn.  
  
So she took lovers, she slept on silk sheets, she ate the finest meats and drank the finest wine, she made arrangements for herself and her heirs. She spent countless mountains of gold every year building fine palaces, commissioning fine paintings and statues, and wearing fine clothes.  
  
The loyalty of a true zealot was very nearly priceless.  
  
The only thing she would count above it, perhaps, was a full-grown fire dragon, magically enslaved to her will. She could have conquered the known world. She could have burned the topless towers of Isntium, put the Czar to the torch, and made the elven king in the south bend the knee, and the only reason she did not now _have_ it was _Casimir di Sabbia’s incompetence_.

She spent the next month re-making her ruined plans, still coldly furious.  
  
And if she occasionally thought of Casimir, what of it? He was the reason for her fury. She hoped, for his sake, that he had been eaten by the fucking dragon.  
  
Occasionally she let herself imagine this. Casimir, burned to a crisp, his fine black hair catching light and his enormous fevered eyes shriveling to nothing. Stupid, easily manipulated Casimir, with his soft body and his solemn face, the enormous sorry bulk of him suddenly nothing more than smoke and air.

She remembered the first time she’d ever seen him, a too-tall boy choking on his own tongue, his hands scrabbling uselessly at his own throat. She’d healed him without thinking about it, just because he was a child and in pain, and she was an adult and there. It wasn’t until her hands were on him, and the healing Word flowing from her to the burned-out ruin of his mouth, that she realized he was the Tiefling child, and might yet be of use to her.

It was utterly within her rights to send a man to his death. To punish her servants when they failed her. But part of her couldn’t help remembering that shuddering child, too-used to pain, and how he’d looked at her like she was water in the desert.  
  
“I don’t care if he’s dead,” she said out loud.

The wooden statue at the altar across from her bed laughed at her in the dark of the night.

*  
  
Elís, that bitch, didn’t let it go.  
  
“When did you start torturing boys?” the little sable woman on her crucifix whispered to her, when she was meant to be praying ceremonially with the ambassador to Aulandr’il.  
  
“Hail Moira,” Dominica said calmly, grasping the crucifix in her fist like she was simply moved to bring it closer to her heart, “Full of Grace. Blesséd art Thou among humans, and blesséd is the fruit of Thy womb, Elís.”  
  
When the ambassador left, she hissed: “He isn’t a boy.”  
  
The rosary remained a rosary, but she got the distinct sense that something, somewhere, was smiling slyly at her.

A month later, she briefly gave into temptation, and scried for him idly in a cup of wine.

The wine went up in flames.

“What in God’s name does that mean,” she snarled, tossing the bitter dregs at the scholar she had dug out of the archives to explain obscure and infuriating phenomena.  
  
He looked terrified, as he should. “The person your Holiness is looking for is in Hell,” he explained, his voice shaking a little.

Dominica stared at him.  
  
“The ninth circle, at least,” he said, almost white with fear.  
  
“You may go,” she said after a moment. She gestured to her attendants, and they all went with him, leaving her alone in the room.

Or as alone as she ever was.  
  
“Fuck,” she whispered.

She threw the wine glass at the wall, where it shattered. She stood there for a long moment, breathing heavily, the shards glinting almost invisibly at her feet, when the painted Elís on the wall tilted her head very slightly to the side.

The fresco depicted a scene from the Book of Petra, where Elís wrote the first healing Word on a parchment and gave it to her most trusted disciple.  
  
The painted Elís finished writing, and Dominica stepped grudgingly forward to read what it said.  
  
HABITAS.PARVULUS  
  
He lives, little one.  
  
“ _Fuck_ ," she swore, and threw another wine glass at the wall.  
  
*  
  
The first thing Casimir did when he returned from Hell was leave the others, and go alone to a clearing in the woods.  
  
St. Petra had told him it would work, and now he could finally try.  
  
He could use his cross as a focus, but he thought of St. Petra, and decided to avoid harming himself, if possible. He lit incense instead, and carefully removed the vial of holy water he wore from around his throat and splashed it on the ground, in a careful circle around him.    
  
He knelt down, closed his eyes, and prayed.  
  
He wasn’t sure how long it was until he became aware that he was no longer alone, but by then he was shaking. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, certain that he wouldn’t be able to bear what he saw if he opened them.  
  
She gave no outward sign, but he heard a low sigh a few feet before him, and a tear slid humiliatingly down his cheek.  
  
“Oh Highest,” he whispered, _“_ O Holy One. My Goddess. Did I fail You, when I failed the Pope?” 

There was a soft sound, and then agony. His eyes flew open, and there she was, standing before him.  
  
She looked like an ordinary woman, small, thin, brown, her cloud of black hair twisted delicately away from her face, but everything about her was so _much_ that it hurt him. She was Love, she was Light, she was Forgiveness and Life. She was touching him, her fingertips three distinct points on his jaw, and smoke curled up from her fingertips. He was absolutely certain the marks would scar.  
  
He was absolutely certain She was his Goddess.  
  
“No,” she told him softly, and he barely remembered the question.  
  
“Do all Tieflings--and mermaids, and orcs, or--do all thinking people--have souls which can--earn a place in Your heaven?” He stumbled over his speech, knowing he only had three questions before she left, but a trembling joy was already soaking into the splinters of his heart, working some strange alchemy there.  
  
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him, her eyes as gold and warm as suns.

The spell was meant for yes or no questions. Anything which could not be answered with an affirmative or negative might well be wasted. But she was here, Elís his Goddess, before him, and he couldn’t help but ask. “How can I best serve you, Highest?”  
  
Elís his Goddess looked thoughtful for a long moment, and if you did not look at her eyes, you might mistake her for an ordinary woman in an ordinary clearing, gently touching a weeping man’s face with one brown hand. She opened her mouth, but the voice that emerged was not hers. It was Screech’s, full of panic and frustration. “Heal yourself, Casimir! Heal _somebody_ !”  
  
His breath hitched in his chest, and Elís smiled at him one last time, and then she was gone.  
  
He didn’t know how long he sat there, weeping, but it was a long time.  
  
*  
  
When he finally came back to himself, the moon had risen, and the candles had burned out. There were many things for him to do, but only one stood out, plain as a tolling bell.  
  
_You lied to me,_ he thought, clear and furious, and the thought journeyed out into the night, many leagues across the ocean, to the Holy See in Rema. _You lied to me, Lucrezia. And now I know the truth, and I am coming for you._  
  
It was a long moment before his answer came. Her voice should no longer have any power over him, especially now that he knew what a paltry imitation of the Goddess she was, but the familiar rich timbre still set his chest to aching.  
  
_Well_ , she said, and she sounded distant and strange. _Then come for me, Casimir._  
  
He dashed the tears from his eyes, clutched the iron cross in his hand, and stood.

There was work to be done.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I can't show this to my actual campaign friends, because it contains SPOILERS and SPECULATIVE SPOILERS and frankly I'm GONNA Commune with Elís and then Send to Dominica as soon as I hit Level 10 and get Commune, and I don't want to ruin that for them--
> 
> \-----but i can't get this out of my HEAD, so please, if you read this, stroke my confused ego a little. 
> 
> (My Ego: IT'S A WORK OF GENIUS, MON AMI.  
> Me: Yeah, but remember no one can read it because of Reasons.  
> My Ego: WHAT?) 
> 
> anyway, yeah, feedback appreciated <3


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